I need to set the stage by talking about two recent Westerns. Ari Aster’s EDDINGTON is a film about the lack of sense the filmmaker could make of the United States’ response to the relentless horror of 2020. Like all Westerns, it’s about the collapse of a frontier. It shares a sense of terminal dread regarding the future with Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH. Where Peckinpah used the tripod mounted machine gun as a symbol of the future, Aster uses it as one of antiquity. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe Cross looks like a stupid asshole stumbling around with a machine gun in the climax when the most potent weapon pointed at him is a cellphone’s camera. He thinks the vanishing frontier is New Mexico’s desert, but instead it’s the end of relief for agitated conspiratorial doomscrolling. Ari Aster’s primary purpose in EDDINGTON is not to entertain us, but to lecture us on the moment scrolling stopped feeling good. That’s fine. It’s one of the two kinds of movies made now. It’s a deeply personal statement by an auteur filmmaker. If it entertains you, that’s fine, but it’s not why we’re here. We’re here to hear what Aster has to say.

The second Western I want to talk about is DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. The core of the film is metatextually about the collapse of a great American movie studio that could no longer navigate the rapidly changing landscape. Deadpool, the character, and Wolverine, the character, were prize bargaining chips in the poker game that was the sale of 20th Century Fox to Disney. Deadpool had unseated Jesus Christ as the top grossing R-rated character of all time and Wolverine was the tentpole of the over-20-year-old Fox X-Men franchise. While no single film in that franchise had done AVENGERS: ENDGAME numbers, they all generally performed well and usually didn’t fall to critical scorn. But what happens to poker chips once the game is over and the casino is imploded? They’re just tokens, mementos. They are memories riding around in wallets. The film replicated the dynamics of a Western, both intentionally and unintentionally. Its bland-as-shit Western vistas were certainly meant to call the West to mind in a cute way. The mid-century modern douchebaggery of the TVA was Disney’s very limp attack on itself. Hah hah hah. Here’s Disney ready to shut down the frontier of Fox. Where we could actually feel the end of an era and sense the tripod mounted machine gun of the inevitable future was in the film blotting out any meaningful mention or depiction of queerness. Deadpool had previously been played as a slippery pansexual imp who loved Vanessa but given his druthers was happy to flirt with and fuck everyone. Negasonic Teenage Warhead, previously depicted as unapologetically out and queer, was shuffled to the background and evidence of her gayness erased.

What DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE replaced queer representation with metastasized, invasive marketing and product linking. Didn’t see Loki before this? Fuck you, catch up. A joke showing Deadpool cradling a dying Thor meant to tee up AVENGERS: SECRET WARS as a goof. There’s no more frontier because the committee, whoever that might be, has voted to put up these billboards. This is the second kind of movie that exists now. It doesn’t particularly care if you like it or connected with. Its main goal is to get you willingly into the client state where seeing the new shit movie is relief because it readies you for the next shit movie. Then when the next one comes out, you can grunt in familiarity when it calls back to this. Film by committee for established products.

The real vanishing frontier for cinema are movies that exist between committee advertising exercises and the work of indulgent auteurs. We can ride roller-coasters, or listen to often-didactic lectures.

That’s why Tony Tost’s AMERICANA feels like an old friend standing in front of an open Coleman cooler in summer and simply asking us, “Beer?” Hell yeah, Tony. I’ll take a beer. AMERICANA is uncoupled from the obligation of a larger cinematic universe. Tost is content to let his beliefs bubble to the surface in the way he tells a story instead of making his film be about his beliefs. 

Tony Tost feels like part of the rear guard of a generation of filmmakers who had a meaningful part of their teen years informed by the critical and commercial anointing of Quentin Tarantino. In the last few years, we’ve had the cheeky Los Angeles crime caper BORDERLINE, directed by Jimmy Warden and starring Samara Weaving, this month’s EENIE MEANIE, directed by Shawn Simmons and also starring Samara Weaving. At least Simmons also added unexamined adoration of Edgar Wright to his stew. Michael Day’s CLAWFOOT used Francesca Eastwood and Milo Gibson. Most obnoxiously, JT Mollner’s STRANGE DARLING had its head so far up its own ass that it wasted a title card on telling us it was shot on film. No shit, bad movie. We’re very proud of you. What this herd of tripe has in common is a lack of curiosity about Tarantino’s forebearers. His work was a synthesis, built on understanding, of innumerable film movements before him. Even if you find Tarantino’s work simply tolerable he at least knows what the fuck he’s talking about. These filmmakers were content to think stoned Ed Begley Jr. eating Belgian waffles was enough as long as there was a needle drop behind it. It isn’t. Fuck off.

Tost is part of smaller coterie filmmakers who are obviously influenced by Tarantino but saw his work as the legend on a map pointing to bigger, more interesting and complex work. I’m reminded of 2019’s incredible BLOOD QUANTUM, directed by Jeff Barnaby, coincidentally enough also a neo-Western. Yes, Tost and Barnaby employ shuffled chronology, needle drops, trunk shots, and title cards in the Benguiat font, but they recognize Tarantino as a costumed charmer rearranging the filmic language of earlier years. Tarantino isn’t the destination; he’s a road sign telling you how far you are from your destination.

The tokenization and trivialization of the past’s important symbols is at the heart of AMERICANA. The ghost shirt, created by the prophet Wovoka, was a lightning rod for the desire for Indigenous self-governance and the end of colonialism. As various tribes were pushed around the West by settlers, military action, or genocidal resettlement onto reservations combinations of belief systems emerged. The existing Paiute spirit or round dance was co-opted by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who wove claims of invulnerability to earthquakes into lore lifted from Mormon preaching. When the synthesis reached the Lakota the talk of the shirts providing invulnerability expanded from earthquakes to combat with the military. This lead to the disaster at Wounded Knee. Some estimates are as high as 300 out of the 350 Lakota at Wounded Knee were killed by the US Seventh Cavalry under the command of James Forsyth.

What makes Wounded Knee unique amongst American tragedies and such a compelling hook for the center of AMERICANA is that a prevailing colonialist sentiment that the West was won coincided with the development of new technologies that allowed fearmongers and armchair liberals to fetishize and romanticize Indigenous people in equal measure. As part of the research for his monograph, The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, ethnographer James Mooney made multiple recordings of the audio of the dance. The advent of the Kinetoscope meant audiences were paying to films that scandalized and thrilled and in the wake of Wounded Knee a 22-second film entitled SIOUX GHOST DANCE offered predominantly white audiences the fetishistic thrills they wanted. Audio and video recordings and a taste for shocking prevented the Ghost Dance from receding in larger popular memory. For the Paiute, Lakota and Sioux the dance and shirt were painful reminders of the septic invasion of colonialism. Those early audio and video recordings turned this flash point into a plaything for those who played with the history of the West, instead of respecting it.

Just like the ghost shirt itself, most of the character identities in AMERICANA seem at odds with themselves. Is Mandy (Halsey) a reckless and irresponsible parent willing throw her kid away for a chance to get rich, or is she a woman dealing with a lifetime of trauma the best way she knows how? Is Roy Lee Dean the “last true cowboy,” or a shameful, violent profiteer dressed like a gaudy pimp? Is Lefty Ledbetter a lonely, pathetic anachronism, or a tender, loving man with a good, strong back? Is Penny Jo Poplin a would-be country singer aching to get to Nashville’s vanished frontier, or a femme fatale playing a moon-eyed diner patron like a fiddle?

Like so many things about America, the answer is often both or neither, with equal measures of sincerity. With rare exception, Tost doesn’t judge his characters. He lets them free with a loose touch and lets us form judgment and empathy for ourselves. In a film filled with some of the best actors working today, that's a pleasure.

Paul Walter Hauser is one of those best actors working today. His performance in RICHARD JEWELL might be the best in the last ten years, and just earlier this summer, he brought the sepsis of the American Dream into focus in THE LUCKIEST MAN IN AMERICA. In AMERICANA, Hauser’s Lefty Ledbetter dances on the edge of pathetic without ever sacrificing Lefty’s humanity. There’s a raw emotional depth to his work and a physicality to his work than invites the best from his co-stars. His vulnerability and commitment most benefit Sydney Sweeney here. Sweeney has often been unfairly reduced to her beauty in appraisal of her craft, but she is so much more than that. In her best performances prior to this, REALITY and THE VOYEURS, there’s a quality to her work about being observed. AMERICANA takes advantage of this with striking results. Sweeney’s character is at the absolute periphery of the hunt for the ghost shirt, and her eyes turn eastward towards Nashville. She wants to be a country singer. She still believes in a long-gone version of Nashville, one where broken soul singers are discovered in honky-tonks. She doesn’t acknowledge the Vegas style tourist hellscape that Nashville is now where the power of music is sold on T-shirts but missing in the soul of the city. Everyone in AMERICANA is chasing ghosts.

Hauser and Sweeney’s interplay is mesmerizing. There’s a scene in the film which operates on the same level as Jesse and Celine in the listening booth in BEFORE SUNRISE, where Hauser and Sweeney are playing darts and you can see the moment his character falls in love with her. It’s extraordinary, especially when considered with an earlier scene, where Hauser is practicing a wedding proposal on Sweeney, and she finds such fragility in her reaction. 

But AMERICANA is an ensemble piece, and there are other performances and threads deserving attention. Gavin Maddox Bergman plays Cal. Cal’s a boy lost in fantasy because of an inattentive mother and living with her vile, abusive, shitty boyfriend. He’s retreated into the idea that he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Every actor who enters Bergman’s orbit finds a compelling and competent scene partner. Most of Bergman’s work is with the talented Zahn McClarnon. Bergman and McClarnon find the wistful melancholy fantasy in Cal’s assertion. If Cal is the reincarnation of Sitting Bull, then he doesn’t have to deal the trouble at home. McClarnon’s Ghost Eye doesn’t live into Cal’s childish expectations for Native people, directly calls him out on cultural appropriation bullshit, but somehow shows him more attention and care than anyone else in his life. There’s a simple wordless exchange between the two in the third act I don’t want to spoil but, god, these two get more out of a head nod and a door closing than most do with minutes of dialogue.

Narratively, Bergman’s most important scene partner is Halsey as his mother, Mandy. Halsey was woefully underutilized in Ti West’s unambitious MAXXXINE, where all that was asked of her was to have a memorable accent and be charming. I’ve been hoping to see more of her since 2021’s IF I CAN’T HAVE LOVE, I WANT POWER. Her visual album was a 50-minute whirlwind that required Halsey be able to carry a cohesive narrative through physical acting. Here, Tost trusts her with so much more, and that faith is rewarded. Mandy’s story intersects with nearly every other major character in the film. It’s through Mandy that we find the location of our final RIO BRAVO-esqe shoot-out: her father’s ranch. In the space of about twenty minutes, Tost reveals the ranch to be a nesting doll of atrocities. Each reveal is shocking, but Halsey needs to play these reveals with familiarity, sadness, and a hint of guilt. She nails it, and carries that same combination into the scenes with her son. It’s wrenching.

 Nigel Bluck shoots the hell out New Mexico, standing in for South Dakota. I’ve been a fan of Bluck’s work since he infused so much heart into the Virginia/North Carolina tidewater region in THE PEANUT BUTTER FALCON. Here, his West amplifies the loneliness of these characters. The land seems oppressive as Cal walks down a lonely road surrounded by endless fields and a clotted gray sky. The spray painted back of a sign admonishes him, and us, that the story is on stolen land. There’s a sad nostalgia to the way Bluck shoots the one horse town. The street is empty, the architecture, brickwork; it looks like the world stopped grinding forward in the 1940s. In a great touch of photography intersecting with clever production design the scene with darts I mentioned earlier takes place in VFW hall. A town relying on a VFW for its bar is an antique notion. AMERICANA seems to notice we all live in some layer of the past, either trapped or by choice.

 Tost’s pacing is propulsive and never lingers when it doesn’t need to. His sound design spare, never overwhelming his actors and judicious needle drops never bring too much sauce to the moment. The film’s finest music moment is bound to character in the film’s final moments when Sweeney, driving east, sings "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" by Dolly Parton. It’s a powerful choice. The song, like the ghost shirt, has been through multiple layers of meaning. It started as Parton’s song of personal reclamation and emergence, and decades later, it became loaded with nationalism in a post-9/11 American landscape. She’s driving to a version of a city that doesn’t exist anymore, but the small, dead town and an overbearing mother are in her rear view, so who’s to say if her liberation is delusion?

Tony Tost has said he wants to build a career out of stringing together ‘minor masterpieces.’ An admirable goal and one that’s increasingly difficult in today’s film market. The call is either for DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE’s design by committee excess or EDDINGTON’s disinterest in being entertaining. As long as Tost can secure funding, I’m in. I could watch five more of these “minor masterpieces” right now.

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